Friday, December 12, 2014

House Passes Torture Bill

(Update, 12/14: Make that the entire Congress. A link to the gory details is below.)

They come not to abolish pain, but to inflict even more of it.Congress just held its annual holiday party for its high-rolling donors. This year's cutesy theme was The Cromnibus That Stole Christmas. Yet again, they reprised their Scrooge role, robbing the poor and giving to the rich. And boy, were they ever sneaky about it this time around. As the whole world was reeling over revelations that Torture R Us, our leaders hastily wrapped up an Economy-sized giant rectal feeding tube in shiny paper, bestowed it upon a reeling public, and told us to "crom" it up our asses. They robbed pension funds, they defanged an already toothless Dodd-Frank, and they made political bribery even sleazier by increasing ten-fold the allowable individual donations to the Duopoly. And then the "People's House" packed it in and started going home for Christmas to collect more spoils from their grateful political donors, who should be cheery that their outsized clout has once again put taxpayers on the hook for the risky bets guaranteed to cause another financial implosion sooner or later. The upper-crusty Senate is expected to rubber-stamp the deal shortly*, in order to continue the beatings and to beat the get-out-of-town rush.House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who only a year ago was urging her Democratic caucus to "embrace the suck" by throwing millions of long-term unemployed under the bus so as to keep the government humming, pivoted back to full populist mode yesterday, trying to outdo Elizabeth Warren in the anti-bankster rhetoric department. Barack Obama, practicing for his upcoming star turn as post-Clinton triangulator, played the part of the Uncloseted Republican, going into full court press for Wall Street. He rallied his whole cabinet of Citigroup lobbyists to twist the same arms that had so lately fiercely acquiesced to Citigroup's dictating of the actual bill. Once you've put out for Wall Street, it gets increasingly hard to say No to Wall Street.It was Good Cop-Bad Cop Kabuki theater at its most nauseating.The mainstream media, though, are cheering because it was essentially a very good show, chock-full of suspense and identity politics. The New York Times has this glowing review:

The House narrowly passed a $1.1 trillion spending package on Thursday
that would fund most government operations for the fiscal year after a
rancorous debate that reflected the new power held by Republicans and
the disarray among Democrats in the aftermath of the midterm elections.

The accord was reached just hours before the midnight deadline, in a 219-206 vote,
amid the last-minute brinkmanship and bickering that has come to mark
one of Congress’s most polarized — and least productive — eras. The
legislation now heads to the Senate, which is expected to pass it in the
coming days.

The split in the Democratic Party dramatically burst into view when Representative Nancy Pelosi,
the minority leader and one of President Obama’s most loyal supporters,
broke with the administration over a provision in the bill that would
roll back regulation of the Dodd-Frank Act, which Ms. Pelosi said was a
giveaway to big banks whose practices helped fuel the Great Recession.
She spoke on the House floor in the early afternoon, expressing her
strong opposition to the bill.

As much as I believe that Pelosi's impassioned speech was cynically timed to provide some staged Shakespearean conflict with the paramour (Obama) who then publicly spurned her, for the Times to characterize the Democrats' new-found populism as "disarray" is a bit rich. The Gray Lady apparently likes her little marital spats to be decorous. The Gray Lady has reduced the shoving of a giant torture tube up America's butt to nothing but a little bickering among friends.

Mr.
Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. were pressed to make a
furious round of phone calls to try to persuade wavering Democrats,
while House Speaker John A. Boehner worked to get more Republican votes.

The
public support of the sweeping spending bill by the White House — which
came just as Ms. Pelosi was making her speech on the House floor
opposing it — was a rare public break with the minority leader and
infuriated many of her loyalists.

Infuriated loyalists make the perfect targets for new rounds of Democratic fund-raising appeals. "Embracing the suck" cost them the mid-terms, so now it's back to the pretend-populism cycle again. I'm already getting emails urging me to show my solidarity with multimillionaire Nancy by throwing them some cash.

In
a more than three-hour, closed-door meeting of House Democrats on
Thursday night, many of the party’s more liberal members tried to rally
support against the bill. The moment, they said, was one of conscience,
and a chance for Democrats to demonstrate their allegiance with the
middle class.

“We’ve
got to stand up for principle at some point, or they’re going to kick
us even more next year when they have a bigger majority,” said
Representative Peter A. DeFazio, Democrat of Oregon. “They know we will
stand our ground on principle in the future and not roll us so easily
again.”

Standing their ground is a little late, but at least it was a "chance for Democrats" to pander to the base by pretending to be on their side. It was an "opportunity" for them to be seen as pro-middle class, even though it was only a year ago that they joined with the GOP to impoverish millions of jobless people and compromise over cuts to the food stamp program. Those were the days when they thought they could win the mid-terms by simply out-fundraising the Republicans. They won't be rolled so easily again. Because veering to the right and openly rolling the American people comes with a price.

In an emergency gathering, Democrats also expressed anger at Denis R.
McDonough, the White House chief of staff, at what they saw as the
president’s undercutting of Ms. Pelosi and other progressives by coming
out in support of the deal so early in the day. But Ms. Pelosi
ultimately gave her members the freedom to vote how they wanted. “I’m
giving you the leverage to do what you have to do,” she said. “We have
enough votes to show them never to do this again.”

She showed them, all right. Because it was a show. She dog-whistled as much when she told them to go ahead and vote for their Wall Street donors if that's what they needed to do. Moreover, the fix was already in, so a "nay" vote would look good on paper, if not in reality. Pelosi is like the abused wife who tells her beater that next time, she'll call the cops. So there.

The final vote was a blow to Ms. Pelosi, the liberal wing of the party
and Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, who led the
charge against the Dodd-Frank rollback. Mr. Boehner built a coalition of
162 Republicans and 57 Democrats, a rare achievement for a Congress
that has often operated along strict party lines. Congress also passed a
two-day funding measure to give the Senate time to pass the
legislation.

This is the part where "the base" gets all riled up and their wallets get all opened up. And the bipartisan vote is anything but "rare." It is, in fact, quite common and well done to a crisp. When it comes to funding wars, the surveillance state, the banks and the corporate welfare queens, these clowns are always reaching across the aisle and slapping each other on the back while they slap the rest of us upside the head.

And here's my published comment to a piece by Gail Collins, suggesting that we discuss the Cromnibus at our weekend holiday dinner parties:

We don't need a dinner party to discuss the Cromnibus from Hell. Who has
the appetite? What this occasion demands is a national wake, because
we're already spectators at our own funeral.

That Wall Street and
billionaires own the government is a given. But our "reps" aren't even
bothering to pretend any more. To me, the cruelest part of this
plutocratic manifesto is that it allows multi-employer pension plans to
slash the benefits of 1.5 million retirees. The irony is that many of
these endangered pension plans were made that way by the same reckless
Wall Street Casino behavior that Congress and the White House now want
to restore and reward. Instead of another Glass-Steagall Act, the bad
guys get richer and the workers get screwed.

The politicians we elect to represent us couldn't make their allegiance any plainer if they rubbed our noses in their effluent.

What a week to be an American citizen. First we learn about the torture
done in our names to people in other countries. Then we learn that even
more economic torture will be foisted upon us.

We call it
torture -- our leaders call it patriotism. We call it graft and
corruption. They call it compromise and a victory for bipartisanship. We
say we're mad as hell. They say we all have to have some skin in their
rigged game, and to stop questing after unicorns.

They say change takes time and patience. We say that they'll continue in Gordon Gekko-Torquemada mode at their own peril.

As long as the Proles continue to work and breed contentedly, and are supplied with an unending array of distractions to lure them into passivity, they will not be that difficult to control. They continue to amuse themselves to death. They have been trained to love their servitude.

The moral and ethical center of America is now hollow.

Where has the idealism that once defined the American spirit gone to?

“For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights: And Other Stories

The beatings will continue with much suffering among the vast majority of people.

When will we ever learn?

P.S. A quote that I ran across on the internet by an old chastiser: “Geez I wish Obama had the balls to prosecute these war criminals!” Just now waking up and smelling the coffee?

Can I just say to Karen: I think you are awesome. I used to read your comments in the NYT, I don't see them too often now, but I'm thankful for this blog, I literally cheer every word you write.Thank you.